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Better workforce plans save lives at South Central Ambulance Service
Emergency responders mobilize Anaplan to forecast demand for services and deploy their life-saving workforce
Disaster can strike at any time, so ambulance teams and emergency services must always be ready to respond fast. South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) in England deployed Anaplan solutions to forecast demand for its services and create workforce plans to ensure that the right resources are immediately available. This boosted efficiency increased accuracy and agility and ultimately improved response to unexpected events.
With Anaplan, having a better forecast helps us mitigate risk, particularly around spikes in demand.David Webb, Head of Forecasting
15-minute
workforce-planning intervals help emergency service operators respond to surges in demand
Automation
enhances planning processes by eliminating manual forecasting tasks
Every second counts when responding to emergency calls, and even the shortest delay could tip the balance in a life-or-death situation.
Responsible for delivering ambulance and emergency services in six counties in southern England, South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SCAS) is expert in mobilizing its crews and equipment to help people in need.
Delivering an effective emergency response demands more than racing to the scene. Trained people must be on hand to answer emergency calls when they arrive. Then, the right people and resources must be in the right place at the right time to ensure the best possible outcomes. To achieve the optimum balance between resource capacity and demand, SCAS must predict the number of daily emergency calls it will receive, and use this data to allocate human resources with a detailed workforce plan.
Increasingly, the work requires a strategic mindset. “Five years ago, we were the first ambulance service in the UK to form a planning directorate, recognizing the importance of looking forward in delivering sustainable performance,” says Steve West, Director of Planning and Performance at SCAS. “And the last five years we’ve been developing our model around how we plan our resources, our people, and our finance.”
The scale is huge and the need is continuous. “We employ three and a half thousand staff across 29 sites,” West notes. “We’re planning those three and a half thousand staff every week, 24/7. In the emergency environment, we are required to be with a patient in a time-critical incident, such as a cardiac arrest, within seven minutes—and in that environment, minutes saves lives.”
Although SCAS’s existing planning cycle kept services running smoothly, its manual, spreadsheet-based processes created additional costs and complexity. To ensure value for taxpayers, SCAS sought to replace manual planning with automated processes.
Next-level demand planning
SCAS selected Anaplan solutions to enable this strategic planning transformation and improve integration and automation across the organization. “One of the best things about Anaplan is that it’s interconnected,” says Mary Trustworth, Business Information Analyst at SCAS. “Once you’ve set up a hub, the information can move through into different models quite seamlessly.”
Anaplan’s scalable, cloud-native platform was key to handling SCAS’ huge data volume while keeping operational IT costs to a minimum and supporting multi-location working. The solution processes billions of data points monthly and displays that granular data in dashboards that can be viewed on any device, including tablets. “It’s actually really helpful having a cloud-based solution because that means that, no matter where we are, we’re able to log on and actually see what our resourcing looks like,” Trustworth says.
The solution SCAS built also leverages PlanIQ, the Anaplan intelligence framework that embeds the Amazon™ Forecast ML engine for predictive forecasting and continuous, agile scenario modeling. The time-series forecasting capabilities in PlanIQ enable SCAS to create new predictive models that boost forecast accuracy even more. “Plan IQ brings us a number of advantages within the Anaplan platform,” says David Webb, Head of Forecasting at SCAS. “Most notably, its seamless integration with the platform lets us leverage different levels of information and data, improving our overall data quality and also helping us hone the forecasting.”
With Anaplan, SCAS can analyze its workforce plans in 15-minute increments, enabling it to adapt quickly to sudden surges in demand, meet response-time targets, and deliver more-effective care. “With Anaplan, having a better forecast helps us mitigate risk, particularly around spikes in demand,” Webb says. “And it helps us to ensure that we’ve got the right resource match for the best response and outcome for patients.”
He adds: “I would recommend Anaplan as a platform because it’s given us the ability to bring lots of data points and information together. It used to take us many weeks and months sometimes to leverage the information that we’ve almost got at our fingertips within Anaplan.”
Finally, it is worth noting the critical role Anaplan played in enabling SCAS to meet the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m incredibly proud of how South Central Ambulance Service responded to the pandemic,” West says. “I think my team and Anaplan has
Steve West, Director of Planning and Performance, South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust: Five years ago, we were the first ambulance service in the UK to form a planning directorate, recognizing the importance of looking forward in delivering sustainable performance.
In the last five years we've been developing our model around how we plan both our resources, our people, and our finance.
We employ three and a half thousand staff across 29 sites. We're planning those three and a half thousand staff every week 24/7.
We are required to be with a patient in a time-critical incident, such as a cardiac arrest, within seven minutes. And in that environment, minutes saves lives.
David Webb, Head of Forecasting: We use the forecast in Anaplan for two main elements. One is strategic business planning over two to five years. The second is for looking at on-the-day resourcing within our six week planning cycle
Mary Trustworth, Business Information Analyst: Before Anaplan, we used to have quite a few spreadsheets that we used to use as an organization. We would have separate ones for finance, for workforce, and for HR.
David Webb: We use our forecasting to understand our resource requirements, to match a safe and steady balanced service against some financial planning constraints, but ultimately for patient outcomes.
Mary Trustworth: Our CCC (clinical coordination centre) forecasting model allows us to forecast how much demand we're expecting to come into our clinical coordination centres, which is where the phones are answered.
We are able to look at historical data to ascertain how many calls we are expecting to respond to. As a result, we can then make sure that we have the right amount of resources, in terms of ambulances or cars or any other frontline responders, to be able to respond.
David Webb: So the strategic and budget setting tends to be long-term strategic views for five years. But the daily information, which all of our teams use, the information is 15 minute incrementals. So we can see anywhere within organization, our resource requirements and the match to that resource within a 15 minute window.
With Anaplan, having a better forecast helps us mitigate risk, particularly around spikes in demand. And it helps us to ensure that we've got the right resource match for the best response and outcome for patients.
Mary Trustworth: It's actually really helpful having a cloud-based solution because that means that, no matter where we are, we're able to log on and actually see what our resourcing looks like.
That's actually been really powerful for our management because they're able to log on and use tablets or laptops. Which obviously has an impact on the patients in the long run.
David Webb: It's given us the ability to bring lots of data points and information together. It used to take us many weeks and months sometimes to leverage the information that we've almost got at our fingertips within Anaplan.
Mary Trustworth: We've managed to achieve quite a lot with the Anaplan platform that I'm proud of.
David Webb: For me, I think the best thing about Anaplan is once you've got it to work, it works really well. So the speed, the information, and your ability to view in a quick and easily accessible fashion anywhere, because it's hosted and network-based.
Mary Trustworth: I think Anaplan is really powerful in helping you attain your full potential.
Steve West: I'm incredibly proud of how South Central Ambulance Service responded to the pandemic, but I think my team and Anaplan has been a core part of our ability to do that as well as we have.
Steve West, Director of Planning and Performance, South Central Ambulance Service: South Central Ambulance Service covers three and a half thousand square miles. We employ three and a half thousand staff across 29 sites. We're planning those three and a half thousand staff every week 24/7.
Mary Trustworth, Business Information Analyst, South Central Ambulance Service: We're currently using PlanIQ to forecast our demand, as an alternative to our legacy process. We've noticed that there's quite a few alternative algorithms in PlanIQ. It's really integrated with the Anaplan models, and has the ability to be scheduled, which means that we can set it once and then have it update on a sequence that we set. That's useful for our operational needs.
David Webb, Head of Forecasting, South Central Ambulance Service: Demand for us is response, effectively. Our workforce plan starts with our demand forecasting. It becomes very complex in terms of our overall ability to plan long-term—our strategic planning—offset against our short-term forecast requirements. PlanIQ made that a lot easier.
It also gives us the ability to revisit elements of our forecast, and play through different scenarios, so we can understand the impact of different demand levels to our model and predict our operational performance.
Plan IQ brings us a number of advantages within the Anaplan platform. Most notably its seamless integration with the platform, letting us leverage different levels of information and data, improving our overall data quality, but also helping us hone the forecasting.
Steve West: We are moving billions of cells of data monthly, and it needed to be a system that could cope with that level of data requirement. So what Anaplan has enabled us to do is to be able to see and visualize that change in demand requirement and be able to plan against that in a very effective way.
